The geek queen: Marissa's on a mission to save Yahoo

There comes a moment in every very ambitious person's life when she sees with perfect clarity that the path before her is blocked. For Marissa Mayer, Google employee No. 20 and Silicon Valley's reigning "geek queen", this moment occurred last year, when her former boyfriend, Google co-founder Larry Page, kicked her off the company's elite operating committee, to which she had been appointed the previous year.

Page had taken over the running of Google's day-to-day operations from Eric Schmidt, the company's longtime CEO, in April 2011, and immediately launched a major renovation of the company's structure and priorities. Mayer was bruised in that reshuffling. For about a dozen years she had presided over "search" - which is to say everything the user saw, felt and experienced when navigating Google - but now she was shunted away from that core business and put in charge of "local" - maps, restaurant recommendations and the like. This was arguably a demotion - at best, a lateral move. And when Page overhauled the operating committee, or "OC", Mayer's reduced status was made both explicit and public. Mayer was not happy, according to people who know her. "Marissa is very, very, very driven," says Brian Singerman, a former Googler who is now a partner at Founders Fund, a venture-capital firm. But at the office, she kept her cool. "She was a trouper," is how someone familiar with the situation described her. "She worked through it.”

Google loyalists said the move was part of the reorganisation, plain and simple. Others said it was political, a punishment for Mayer's inability to play nicely with other VIP Googlers, and bloggers began to wring their hands anew over the larger question of sexism in tech. Two other people removed from the OC were also women; one of them, Shona Brown, who ran business operations, "is a freaking Rhodes scholar", says a former Googler, "another one of these rock stars".

Although some of Mayer's former colleagues insist her affair with Page had no bearing on their friend's corporate profile, others disagree. "It's got to have some impact," says Dave McClure, a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley who knows Mayer slightly. "I don't know too many other senior female executives who went out with the CEO who were still there after they stopped going out." Page got married in 2007. Two years later, Mayer married investor and lawyer Zachary Bogue.

Spreading the word … Marissa Mayer at a technology conference in San Francisco just a few weeks prior to the birth of her son. Photo: Getty Images

She may have been stymied at Google, but Mayer, at 37, was already one of the most visible tech personalities in Silicon Valley. She was popular with the press for her accessibility in an industry notorious for its reclusive, or stammering, geniuses. She threw parties at her penthouse atop The Four Seasons hotel in San Francisco to which everyone yearned to be invited. And throughout Silicon Valley and among the groupies drawn to its idiosyncratic nerd glamour, she was as well known for her hobbies - notably a taste for high-end fashion and a large collection of Dale Chihuly hand-blown glass - as she was for her tech cred. In a world still struggling to leave behind that age-old bias - girls can't do maths - Mayer was everyone's favourite exception, fully girl and fully geek, a former ballet dancer who stayed up all night writing code. And one who seemed driven to make her own path when the men around her wouldn't oblige.

In July, less than a year after news broke of her being sidelined at Google, Mayer was named president and chief executive officer of Yahoo Inc, making her one of 20 female CEOs of Fortune 500 companies and the only one to take the job while pregnant. Yahoo is a foundering brand suffering from a dramatic talent drain and years of chaos on its board and in its upper ranks. Its second-quarter results for 2012 were grim, with US search queries down 17 per cent from a year ago and time spent on its content pages down 10 per cent. Yahoo stock is worth about half of what it was five years ago. Mayer has to turn this around - and fast.

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Her first child, a boy, was born on September 30. "Name TBD," she wrote in an email she sent to a large circle of friends. "Suggestions welcome!" The email was signed, "With love and happiness, Marissa & Zack." It is, perhaps, a blessing that she doesn't think much, she has said, of the high-achieving mother's mantra, "balance".

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In celebration of the new arrival, Mayer's friend, former Googler Craig Silverstein, is thinking about building Mayer a homemade "diaper cake": three tiers of nappies in three different sizes, stacked around an empty cardboard tube and decorated all over with toys, onesies and burp cloths. Mayer has made them for many of her friends' babies and at the tippy top she likes to put a plush toy octopus. Silverstein calls the diaper cake "the perfect Marissa baby present", saying, "It has usability at its core."

Stepping out … with husband Zachary Bogue in September 2011. Photo: Corbis

Now that the US's most notable geek girl has become its most visible CEO mum, there's quite a bit of talk among professional women about how she'll manage. So far, she's not showing any interest in the conversation. No high-profile CEO in crisis-management mode wants to appear distracted; were Mayer a man, she'd surely be expected to hand out cigars and get back to work. So it's difficult to begrudge her reluctance to air her dirty diapers in public. (Mayer has declined to speak publicly about the birth; "Marissa is focusing her energy internally," a Yahoo spokes-person tells me.)

Since her arrival at Yahoo, Mayer has hired some people - a new CFO, marketing chief, head of human resources and publicist, plus one of Google's top advertising executives, Henrique de Castro - and fired some others. She freed up US$4 billion in cash, holding money from the sale of part of Yahoo's stake in the China-based e-commerce site Alibaba instead of returning it to shareholders, creating expectations that she'll soon announce major acquisitions. She's announced the closure of Yahoo's South Korea branch. And she's focused on boosting morale, giving employees free food in the Yahoo cafeteria and making quality-of-life improvements at the corporate gym and the parking lot.

Been there, done that … Marissa Mayer’s predecessor, Carol Bartz, was sacked as CEO of Yahoo in September 2011 after she failed to reverse the company’s falling share price. Photo: Getty images

But what little she has said about her domestic plans has been endlessly masticated. When Yahoo announced Mayer's appointment, the internet was cautiously pleased. But when, in a carefully orchestrated manoeuvre later that same night, Mayer tweeted that she was expecting a baby, interest in her blew up. "My maternity leave will be a few weeks long," she later told Fortune magazine, "and I'll work throughout it.”

The debate was as immediate as it was inevitable: was this good for working women or bad? Does Mayer's display of ambition at the very moment of her blossoming motherhood show that a woman can, indeed, have it all? Yes, wrote Hanna Rosin for Slate.com: "Yahoo for Yahoo". But others were not so sure. Mayer's disregard for the preciousness of the mother-infant bond would not only harm her child - "Poor Marissa," intoned a Christian blog called Wise Family Living - but also set a terrible precedent. Even a member of Angela Merkel's cabinet felt compelled to weigh in: "I respect this personal step being taken by Ms Mayer," said Kristina Schröder, Germany's family minister. "But I regard it with major concern when prominent women give the public impression that maternity leave is something that is not important. Maternity leave is absolutely important and not just from a medical point of view.”

Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook, might agree. Sandberg has been promoting a message recently that is, for her, somewhat new - that women must be able to integrate their identities as mothers with their identities as professionals or they'll never be happy at work. And then they'll never succeed at the highest levels. "Before this," Sandberg said in a speech at Harvard Business School earlier this year, "I did my career like everyone else does it. I never told anyone I was a girl. Don't tell. I left the [office] lights on when I went home to do something for my kids. I locked my office door and pumped milk for my babies while I was on conference calls.”

For all her bravado, Mayer seems to be playing by Sandberg's old rules, and while her reluctance to air her inner conflicts may reflect strategic concerns, it's also a big part of who she is. Since her earliest days at Google, and despite a canny performance of her own "girliness", Mayer has refused to make the Woman Question part of her public persona. She doesn't want to talk at all about how being a woman - in tech, or at Google, or in upper management - makes her different from the guys in the room or deserving of any kind of special consideration. "I'm a geek," is what she always says. She expresses gratitude to high-school science teachers who praised her aptitude and never added, parenthetically and destructively, that she was unusual for it. She insists that in college she never noticed that she was often the only female in the advanced computer-science courses. In Mayer's view, the reason so few girls grow up to be computer scientists is that too few high-schoolers of any gender are exposed to computer science. If it turns out that after widespread exposure to computer science, "we still have an imbalance, we can deal with that then", she said in an interview earlier this year.

Recently, that kind of compartmentalisation has become harder to pull off. At a tech conference in San Francisco in September, Mayer was on stage judging a competition among start-up companies looking unmistakably female - which is to say, hugely pregnant. She wore it well, in a black dress and slides, managing to appear chic-er, neater and more petite than her rumpled and slouching male counterparts. Indeed, the most notable thing about Mayer's appearance that day was the extent to which her body language failed to corroborate her physical condition. She indulged in none of the posture shifting, belly caressing and back massaging that so often signals late-term discomfort. As puppyish entrepreneurs from seven start-ups paraded before her pitching their products - an electric car, an online apartment-rental service, an app that listens in on phone conversations - Mayer sat ramrod straight in a massive leather chair wearing expressions that ranged from blank to dyspeptic and doling out infrequent, grudging smiles. She asked fewer than five questions. "Can you talk about integration with [Apple's] Passbook?" "How are you planning on scaling?" "What kind of accuracies are you seeing?" Then, flanked by bodyguards, she retreated behind a velvet curtain, helped to decide the winner (an online service that sends car mechanics on house calls), and was whisked off into the cold, damp night.

Yahoo has had several CEOs in recent years. Before the board settled on her, it had, according to news reports, already courted David Rosenblatt, of DoubleClick fame, and Jason Kilar, of Hulu. And so, despite its public pledges of support for Mayer the mum, the Yahoo board wasn't really showing its feminist side in hiring her so much as it was praying Hail Mary. "People - men and women both - are more likely to put a woman or minority candidate into a top position when the company is distressed," Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup, says, referring to a phenomenon called the "glass cliff". "This is a job that kind of nobody wants. The company sucks." Mayer may have what it takes to run Yahoo, in other words, but her appointment is also a gimmick. She doesn't want to talk about being a woman, but being a woman - and a pregnant one at that - probably helped her get the job.

Mayer first entered the job market in 1999, after graduating from Stanford with an esoteric major called "symbolic systems", a mixture of philosophy, brain science and artificial intelligence. From several offers she chose Google, starting as an engineer before soon becoming a product manager; she was one of the earliest guardians, in other words, of the Google brand. In particular, Mayer was charged with protecting the home page - that iconic, blank, seemingly immutable interface between the powerful Google search engine and its public.

Over the years, Mayer oversaw dozens of large and small changes that improved the user experience at Google: the ability to type in queries in foreign languages; the enlarging of the search box; the graphical doodles that occasionally grace the logo (like the guitar that played when you ran a mouse over its strings); and, eventually, universal search, which allows users to see results in all categories at once. As she rose through the ranks at Google, she data-tested everything. She tested infinitesimal variations in the amount of white space between the Google logo and the first answer in a search-results list, finding that users liked less white space better. She tested the light-blue backgrounds on Google ads against a yellow hue and found not just that yellow worked better but that yellow ads made users happier with the site overall. In an effort to create coherence among all the different blues on different Google pages and products, Mayer once famously tested 41 shades of blue. "Design," she said at the web-developer conference Google I/O, "has become much more of a science than an art." This philosophy, more than anything else, led Google designer Doug Bowman to quit in 2009. "I won't miss a design philosophy that lives or dies strictly by the sword of data," he wrote in a blog post.

Those who succeed under Mayer tend to share her cutthroat world view: winners win. "She will outwork you; she will outwork anybody," says Dylan Casey, a former professional cyclist who rode on the US Postal team with Lance Armstrong and later worked with Mayer at Google for half a dozen years. Indeed, Mayer has said that she pulled 250 all-nighters in her first five years at Google, and has been dismissive of people who, as she puts it, "want eight hours of sleep a night, three meals a day". Casey remembers sitting in Mayer's office, worrying about office politics - how was he going to get around so-and-so, what would so-and-so say, that sort of thing. The entire time, Mayer was facing away from him, answering email on her computer and nodding her head. Finally, she spoke. "Why are you running around the organisation looking for people to tell you 'no'?" she asked. "You know what to do. Just go do that." It was an empowering directive, Casey says. As a manager, Mayer lays out expectations, then allows people to sink or swim, he adds. "If you achieve excellence, you've met expectations," Casey says. "You should be relieved, not elated.”

When people don't like her, friends say, it's because they find her manner "too transactional". And it's no surprise that an executive so dismissive of excuses would be so uncomfortable with acknowledging the compromises or conflicts of her own life choices. For her, parenthood is not a special category of extracurricular activity. Mayer's approach to questions of work-life balance is to give everyone - male, female, married, single, with children or without - the freedom to leave work for the things that matter most, whether it's dinner with friends or marathon training or being on time for the soccer game.

"I think that burnout happens because of resentment," she has said. "That notion that, 'Wow, I worked 100 hours last week, and I couldn't even have this thing that I really wanted.' " As one of the most senior Googlers on staff, Mayer was notorious for demanding the respect of her peers and not taking kindly to arguments or disagreements from anyone, says another person who knows her. "She doesn't listen as well as she speaks ... I think she's going to be a tough mom.”

Around the time that Mayer was booted off the OC at Google, another high-powered woman was being kicked around at Yahoo. Carol Bartz is, like Mayer, a female geek with a tough exterior. Bartz had been hired in 2009 to rescue the company; on a call with analysts soon after her arrival, she promised to "kick some butt". Yahoo's problems then were not so different to today: a depressed stock price; an exodus of the best talent to competitors, especially Facebook; a bloated organisational structure; a rudderless sense of mission and purpose. Bartz was supposed to change all that. "She presented a take-no-prisoners image and was touted as someone with a reputation as a professional manager who could clean up the place," wrote Kara Swisher in the tech-news blog AllThingsD. Two years into her tenure, after rafts of lay-offs, Yahoo's stock price was only slightly up and the board was at odds over whether or not Bartz had the vision to pull off the kind of dramatic rescue it thought Yahoo needed. A year ago, she left the company after blasting the following email company-wide: "I am very sad to tell you that I've just been fired over the phone by Yahoo's chairman of the board.”

Bartz's replacement, Scott Thompson, resigned after five months in the wake of revelations that he had embellished his resumé. So just how troubled is Yahoo? Nine months ago, the woman who was to be anointed Yahoo's latest saviour couldn't even remember its name. At the Computer History Museum in January, Marissa Mayer took questions. "In 1999, who were Google's competitors in the search space?" one person asked. Mayer approached the question as if it were a parlour game and she were being asked to name the seven dwarves. She screwed up her face and began counting on her fingers: "Oh, let's see. AltaVista. Lycos. Infoseek. Dogpile. Ask Jeeves. GoTo." Here she stopped and paused. For two full beats, she was stuck. And then: "Oh! Yahoo!" Mayer laughed. She has a husky voice, but her laugh is pure dork, a hybrid of giggle and snort. "That's embarrassing.”

So far, despite a vow of "radical transparency", Mayer has revealed very few specific plans to revitalise the company. Trained at Google - where the ethos is to launch products early and often, then fix them later - Mayer is expected to break through the bureaucratic layers that have ossified at Yahoo and draw fresh talent, especially into the ranks of engineers. "Tech people respect her," says Sarah Milstein, a social-media consultant. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the most optimistic Yahoos hope that with her technical chops and her celebrity heat, Mayer can somehow transform drab Yahoo into thrilling Google.

So far, however, investors are less impressed. On her hiring, the stock price barely budged. "I guarantee you 100 per cent that if you put Mark Zuckerberg in that job, the stock price would have gone up," says Eric Ries. On the day after her son's birth, the value of the shares actually fell.

Over the past few years, Mayer has transformed herself from a woman who looked, dressed and talked like a graduate student into a femme-bot tech exec deserving of a spread in Vogue. Indeed, Mayer's true genius lies in the constant cultivation of her own celebrity via new iterations of her geek-girl persona.

Mayer is the most fashion-conscious executive in Silicon Valley, a place where fashion hardly matters. She continues to insist that she's just a geek, even as she pays $60,000 at an auction to have lunch with Oscar de la Renta. Last year, at a Fortune cover shoot, Mayer was photographed in three simple outfits, all suitable office wear. But she wanted to be shot in an Alexander McQueen gown she happened to have with her. And in September, on the day after Yahoo completed the first stage of the Alibaba sale, Mayer tweeted a photo of herself at the opening night of the San Francisco Symphony, wearing a maternity gown by "my friend and brilliant designer Erdem".

She travels the San Francisco party circuit and hosted President Obama at her house for a fund-raiser, but in 2009 she protested to The New York Times that she was "not a girl about town", saying she spent her weekends playing with electronics. Before audiences at Google headquarters, she has interviewed Lady Gaga and Martha Stewart.

This newest version of Marissa, the mum-geek-CEO, will surely test Mayer's powers, for she's playing to a tougher crowd, one that won't be placated by tweets, Manolos and rapturous praise for pineapple malts. Scrutinising her every move are the rest of Yahoo's activist board, 11 (mostly) men who will surely fire her if she can't bring up the company's share price. And back at home there's Baby Boy Bogue, eventually named Macallister, who doesn't care about anything except when he next gets fed.

Edited version of an article that originally appeared in New York Magazine.